Here in the US, who are the big, bold corporate leaders when it comes to corporate responsibility? It’s not a long list. CVS’s decision to stop selling tobacco was a big deal, but I’ll bet you don’t know the name of the company’s CEO.* I’m a big fan of David Crane of NRG Energy, who has been outspoken on the climate issue, but NRG burns a lot of coal. GE’s Jeff Immelt, who talk a lot about energy and climate in the late 2000s, has quieted down, and he now backs the Keystone XL pipeline. Most interestingly, perhaps, Tim Cook of Apple has been speaking out about climate change and gay rights, and the company is doing good work on renewable energy and labor rights in its supply chain. But there aren’t a lot of CEOs in corporate America who are using their influence on behalf of the common good.

Then there’s Howard Schultz. One of corporate America’s longest-running CEOs — he has led Starbucks as either its CEO or chairman since 1987 — Schultz built not only a global economic powerhouse (Sbux has more than 20,000 stores in 65 countries) but also a company that stands for something. This week, the company sponsored The Concert for Valor, a moving tribute to American’s veterans on the National Mall.

I’ve paid close attention to Starbucks since the early 2000s, when I devoted a chapter to the company in my 2004 book, Faith and Fortune. This week, Guardian Sustainable Business launched a new “hub” on leadership, so it seemed like a good time to write about Schultz, and why he matters.

Joel Makower, the writer and founder of GreenBiz Group, put that question to Unilever CEO Paul Polman at last week’s Net Impact conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“There are 5,000 in the audience here,” Polman replied deftly, playing to a crowd of students and young professionals, who aim to use their business skills to change the world for the better.

It’s a good question, though. Why, indeed, aren’t there more CEOs willing to put society’s social and environmental needs at the core of their business, particularly here in the US?

Yvon Chouinard, the rock climber and environmentalist who started Patagonia, is one example, but he no longer runs his company – and in any event, it’s privately-held, which allowed him more room to maneuver.

A slew of business executives founded or led smaller, crunchy-granola firms with impressive environmental records – including George Siemon of Organic Valley, Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation, Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Yogurt, and Drew and Myra Goodman of Earthbound Farms – but their influence is, or was, limited. It’s no wonder Polman sometimes seems to tower over the crowd of global CEOS.

Then there’s Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks.

Schultz in the news this week, which is why his named occurred to me when I thought about Joel’s question. But for the past two decades, he has built a company that revolutionised the fast-food industry: providing ownership and healthcare coverage to its workers, investing in the environmental practices and wellbeing of coffee growers, supporting marriage equality, promoting job-creation during the last recession and, now, honouring America’s veterans.

The other day, at Net Impact’s annual conference in Minneapolis, I moderated a panel called the “Carnivore’s Dilemma,” about eating meat in a carbon constrained world. It’s becoming a familiar conversation. Every other day, it seems, Guardian Sustainable Business, where I do most of my writing, runs a story about alternative proteins, like seaweed and insects. Regular readers know that I write a lot about meat, not just for the Guardian but for Fortune, which ran this story about a company called Beyond Meat and for YaleEnvironment360 where I wrote an essay that asked: Should Environmentalists Just Say No to Eating Beef?

So, during the Net Impact panel, I must admit that I was surprised to see a chart from Ian Monroe, the CEO of a startup called Oroeco, that put the climate-change impact of beef in context. This isn’t the exact chart, but the numbers are similar (carbon footprinting is a very inexact science). You will see that the GHG footprint of beef (combined with lamb, it’s 0.9t CO2e) is smaller than driving, or using electricity at home. For those of us who travel a lot, flying generates far more GHG emissions than anything we eat. Beef, to put it simply, is not that big a deal when it comes to #climate change.

In that context, I wanted to ask Peggy Neu, the president of Meatless Mondays, who also spoke at Net Impact: “Why not carless Mondays?” Or, for that matter, “turn-out-the-lights Mondays”? If the problem at hand is climate change, maybe we are paying a disproportionate attention to beef.

And yet, as Ian Monroe pointed out during the panel, while we can see pathways to low-carbon or zero-carbon transportation electric cars, biofuels) and, at least in theory, we can generate low-carbon electricity using wind, solar and nuclear power, it’s hard to imagine low-carbon or zero-carbon beef. There’s just no getting around the fact that cows, when compared to pigs or chickens or fish, are inefficient converters of feed to protein, and so they generate a bigger environmental footprint. What’s more, globally, meat consumption is growing, as emerging middle class people in China and India eat more beef.

And, of course, animal agriculture has negative impacts that go beyond carbon pollution. It consumes lots of water. Livestock, particularly pigs and chickens, are often treated badly. I recently visited southwestern Minnesota (hello Mankato!) and I can tell you that the odor from pig farms, when the manure is not well-managed, can be unpleasant.

All this is by way of introduction to my latest story for Guardian Sustainable Business, about Modern Meadow, a venture-funded start-up company that one day hopes to grow beef in a lab. You won’t see anything from Modern Meadow in a supermarket anytime soon, although its lab-grown leather could reach the market in a few years.

But at least some investors believe that alternatives to conventional beef could someday become real businesses. Here’s how my story begins:

But, for many of us, food is another matter. We want our food to be pure, free of artificial additives, dangerous pesticides and natural – a term that, incidentally, is all but meaningless. Genetically-modified foods arouse anxiety. We want, in the words of influential journalist Michael Pollan, to avoid eating anything that our “great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”.

That’s a problem for Andras Forgacs. He’s the co-founder and chief executive of Modern Meadow, a Brooklyn-based startup that intends to use tissue engineering – also known as cell culturing or biofabrication – to create livestock products that require fewer inputs of land, water, energy and chemicals than conventional animal agriculture.

What’s more, Forgacs says, his company’s products will also require no animal slaughter.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks reporting a story for the Guardian on NGOs and GMOs–specifically, the ways that some nonprofit groups have stirred up fears about genetically-modified organisms, by taking facts out of context, distorting mainstream science or, occasionally, saying things that simply are not true. I did the story in part because I believe that agricultural biotechnology could be–could be–a valuable tool as we try to feed people in a resource-constrained and warming world. I’m by no means an enthusiastic fan of biotech crops — the rollout of the technology has been managed poorly by the industry–but I’m fairly confident that they have enormous potential. That potential will never be realized until we can have a rational fact-based debate about how the technology should be managed.

But my hope is that this story will make a bigger and more important point about the non-profit sector: That the claims of NGOs and advocacy groups should be received with the same skepticism and scrutiny that we apply to claims from business and government. That might seem like an obvious point, but my experience tells me that many people tend to take what NGOs say at face value. Public opinion surveys also find that NGOs are trusted, far more than corporations or the government.

On the GMO issue, this is a terrible shame. But it helps to explain why, as I write

so many people – 48%, according to Gallup – believe that foods produced using genetic engineering pose a serious health hazard, despite assurances from corporations, government regulators and mainstream scientists that the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) now on the market are safe and, indeed, have been studied, tested and regulated more than any other food product in history.

More broadly, though, it’s too easy to forget that NGOs, like companies or the government or, indeed, all of us, are driven by a set of incentives. Again, from the story:

..non-profits and the people who lead them are subject to the same temptations, pressures and incentives that drive companies: They are self-interested. They seek attention in a noisy marketplace. And they rely on the financial support of donors, just as companies depend on customers.

As it happens, some of the groups opposed to the spread of GMOS are backed largely by corporate interests: Just Label It, a dot-org coalition that favors GMO labels is financed by organic and “natural” food companies that benefit from the anxiety around biotech food.

Follow the money, as Woodward & Bernstein used to say. A lot of money behind the anti-GMO movement comes from the organic food industry. Right now, the best way to avoid GMOs at the supermarket is to buy organic.

To take an example from another arena: When I talk to scientists or engineers about climate change, most do not believe we will be able to power the US economy anytime soon entirely with renewable energy. They believe that some form of zero-carbon baseload power will be needed — either nuclear energy or coal plants with carbon capture. (About which there was a bit of encouraging news this week.) In the US, depending entirely on solar and wind, along with the required energy storage and transmission lines, would be enormously expensive. In places like China and India, it’s unthinkable. So it makes sense for the US to find ways to make nuclear power or coal plants with carbon capture a lot cheaper, so we can export those technologies to the developing world. This is true for solar and wind as well, of course.

Yet environmental groups–the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, in particular–are implacably opposed to nuclear power and, as best as I can tell, they oppose coal with carbon capture. Fracking, too. I don’t doubt the sincerity or the intelligence of their leaders, but I have to believe that if they wavered in their opposition to nukes and coal with carbon capture, their customers, i.e., their members and donors, would revolt. So, at the very least, the deep green groups are less than transparent about the tradeoffs that will be required if we give up on nuclear or so-called clean coal, and put all of our investment into wind and solar.

Another example, from the story:

The issue of credibility goes well beyond GMOs, of course. What’s the most effective way to improve the lives of the world’s poorest people? It’s hard to know whether a comprehensive approach (the Millennium Villages), major health initiatives (the Gates Foundation), micro enterprise (Kiva) or disaster relief (Care) will work best. Each NGO understandably touts its own approach. Meanwhile, economists say trade has done more than aid to help the global poor.

A bigger and more important point, which I’ll save for another day, is the question of who is holding NGOs accountable. It’s an important question because, like it or not, as taxpayers we all help finance the nonprofit sector because donations to NGOs are frequently tax-deductible.

None of this is intended to diminish the enormous value delivered by the nonprofit sector. My next Guardian story will be built upon a terrific new report on corporate taxation put together by a couple of NGOs. The NGOs that I know best, those in the environmental sector, including Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, for the most part do great work. My wife and older daughter work for NGOs, and I’m on the board of Net Impact, a nonprofit that I (obviously) believe in strongly.

None of which means you should automatically believe everything you hear from a so-called public interest group. You shouldn’t.

Imagine a bar and restaurant that, like Newman’s Own, gives all of its profits to charity.

Beer and benevolence, it’s been called. Drafts and donations. More fun, in any case, than salad dressing.

That’s the idea behind Cause, a philanthropub (“a bar where having a good time helps a great cause”) that opened last October in the U. Street/Cardozo neighborhood of Washington, D.C., at 1926 9th St. N.W. I’ve been three times–first to kick off the new year with the D.C. chapter of Net Impact, then to interview founder Nick Vilelle and this past week to have dinner with my wife.

Cause isn’t alone. “Have a pint, save the world,” says the Oregon Public House, which plans to open soon in Portland, a hub of both craft beer and NGO activity. In downtown Houston, bar owners came together last year to open the Okra Charity Saloon; customers, who get a vote with every drink, decide which charity should receive the next month’s profits. The ideas for these charity pubs evidently arose spontaneously and independently. They’re the latest in a wave of mission-driven businesses that blur the lines between the for-profit and non-profit worlds. [click to continue…]

Sadly, today’s guest post from my friend Marcus Chung is timely. The New York Times reported this morning on another factory fire in Bangladesh, this one killing seven women. Is this the price we must pay for cheap clothes? Marcus thinks not–although he’s just 36, he has worked for about a decade on corporate responsibility issues in the apparel industry, doing stints at Gap and Talbot’s. I’ve gotten to know Marcus as a fellow board member at Net Impact, a nonprofit organization of students and young professionals who want to use their business skills to make the world more just and sustainable. That’s exactly what Marcus, a Wesleyan grad with a Berkeley MBA, is doing in his current job, consulting for a global retailer of children’s clothing. Here’s his report from Bangladesh.

From the moment you arrive at the Dhaka airport, it’s clear that the apparel industry is vital to Bangladesh’s economy. Airport walls are lined with posters advertising local garment manufacturers, textile mills, and trims suppliers. Apparel accounts for between 70 and 80 percent of exports, so it’s no surprise that almost everyone on my flight from Hong Kong to Dhaka declared their profession as “buyer” or “sourcing” when clearing through immigration.

I visited Dhaka on behalf of a client to get a better understanding of the CSR challenges, trends, and opportunities that large apparel brands face in sourcing from Bangladeshi garment factories. Following November 2012’s tragic Tazreen Fashions factory fire that claimed the lives of more than 100 workers, there is renewed focus on how the industry can promote better factory working conditions. Tazreen was just the latest in a string of Bangladeshi garment factories that burned to the ground, but it also was the country’s most devastating in terms of lives lost.

Western mass-market apparel retailers source from Bangladesh because they can get a solid product at a competitive price. The apparel industry cannot ignore a fundamental commercial reality: Bangladesh has a ready supply of very capable garment factories that are filled with inexpensive labor. It’s not realistic (or probably advisable–MG)for companies to simply stop sourcing from the country. Therefore, the industry must do a better job of sourcing in a responsible manner that protects the rights of workers and includes basic commitments to a safe and healthy work environment.

A Multitude of Challenges

Over the years, I’ve heard many hypotheses about why fire safety continues to challenge so many Bangladeshi factory managers. Some cite an ineffective, corrupt government that does not enforce its own building code regulations. Others believe factory middle managers, myopically focused on production output, lack the ability or understanding to support fire safety practices with workers. Many believe pressure from Western brands to achieve low-cost goods encourages subversion of basic health and safety standards. I’ve heard people claim the root cause is a basic lack of infrastructure: old, multi-story buildings with poor electrical wiring; unreliable power supply (I cannot count the number of times the power went out during my visit) that causes short-circuits; and dusty, flammable materials lying dangerously close to unprotected electrical outlets. I spoke with one CSR leader who lamented a general lack of civil society and a culture where officials will agree to make improvements, but never follow through. [click to continue…]

Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry’s renown, is asking me for money, and he’s not selling ice cream. I give him a dollar bill, he stamps it in red ink — NOT TO BE USED FOR BRIBING POLITICIANS — and returns it to me. It’s part of his new crusade to get corporate money out of politics.

“Corporations are not people, and money is not free speech,” Cohen declares.

The 61-year-old ice-cream mogul sold Ben & Jerry’s to Unilever in 2000. (He’s on the left, without his trademark beard, next to his longtime pal Jerry Greenfield.) The T-shirt says: “Stamp Money Out of Politics.” These days, as “Head Stamper” at StampStampede, Cohen is working for an amendment to the US Constitution to get money out of politics.

It sounds improbable but no more improbable than this: That a gathering of about 70 people, including Ben and his partner Jerry Greenfield, at the rustic Gold Lake Mountain Resort not far from Boulder, Colorado, Colorado back in 1987 could spawn a movement that has changed the way millions of Americans think about and do business. The Gold Lake get-together led to the creation of the Social Venture Network (SVN), a group of business people, investors and philanthropists, many of them shaped by the political and cultural movements of the 1960s, who believe that business can change the world for the better. About 700 SVN members, friends and family gathered last week in New York for a 25th anniversary dinner and celebration–a time to assess how far their movement to remake business has come, and how far it needs to go.

The dinner was a star-studded affair, at least for those of us who pay attention to businesses that aim to build a more just and sustainable economy. On hand along with Ben and Jerry were Eileen Fisher of the eponymous clothing company, Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm, Drew and Myra Goodman of Earthbound Organic, George Siemon of dairy co-op Organic Valley, Jeffrey Hollender, formerly of Seventh Generation, Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre Hotels, Roger Brown and Linda Mason of Bright Horizons, Amy Domini of Domini Social Investments, all of whom were named to the SVN “Hall of Fame.” Spotted in the crowd of 700 or so were Gifford Pinchot III, president of of Bainbridge Graduate Institute, my friends Seth Goldman of Honest Tea and author Mark Albion (More Than Money: Questions Every MBA Needs to Answer), Danny Kennedy of Sungevity–the closest thing to a power elite of the sustainable business movement.

None of them, to be sure, run FORTUNE 500 companies. But the movement birthed by SVN powered the field of corporate social responsibility, opened up new possibilities for entrepreneurs, raised expectations that big companies now need to meet and helped shape the way companies ranging from Google (“Don’t be Evil”) to Walmart do what they do. [click to continue…]

When it comes to climate change, Ford and its global director of sustainability, John Viera, want to do what they can to be part of the solution. In its latest sustainability report [PDF, download], the company says:

Ford is committed to doing our share to prevent or reduce the potential for environmental, economic and social harm due to climate change.

Viera puts it simply:

Climate change is real. Man has an impact on climate change. We as a company have to do our share.

Behind the rhetoric are actions. Ford has set science-based CO2 targets for North America, Europe, Brazil and China that determine the amount of greenhouse gases that its cars and trucks can emit over time, consistent with stabilizing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere at 450 ppm. Along with other automakers, it has agreed to the U.S. government’s fuel efficiency standards that mandate an average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon for the 2025 model year

All of which is well and good. But as John Viera acknowledged to me the other day, all of those good intentions will not take Ford, or the rest of us, where we need to go. Markets — which are beyond Ford’s control — will play a bigger role than corporate commitments or even the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) rules. [click to continue…]

When I went to college, people with a strong social conscience went into politics or government, joined the Peace Corps, taught school, or became public-interest lawyers or doctors– in other words, they did just about anything but go into the business world. That’s no longer true, thank goodness. Today’s students understand that business can be a force for good and my friend Tim Mohin — we serve together on the board of Net Impact — has written a new book called Changing Business From the Inside Out: A Treehugger’s Guide to Working in Corporations that helps business people, as well as students, understand how they can have a positive impact inside corporate America. Tim, who is currently direct of corporate responsibility at chip-maker AMD, previously worked on social-responsibility issues at Apple and Intel. His book has been heralded as “essential reading for anyone who wants to build a meaningful career” by Aron Cramer, the CEO of Business for Social Responsibility. Here is a guest post from Tim about that offers a sneak peek at the book.

Like jumbo shrimp or military intelligence, “corporate responsibility” is considered an oxymoron by many. People are skeptical of corporations and with good reason. Massive corporate scandals ranging from the 2008 mortgage meltdown, to the BP oil spill, to the recent headlines about Wells Fargo and Barclay’s have left a trail of destruction. The cost to repair the damage has been borne by society in the form of taxpayer-funded bailouts and environmental cleanup. Growing distrust in corporations boiled over last fall, sending young people into the streets in the Occupy Wall Street movement. So, at a time when trust in corporations has reached an all-time low, why is interest in corporate responsibility at an all-time high?

Even before the Occupy protesters set up their camps, corporate behavior was under intense scrutiny. Regulations like “Sarbanes Oxley” and “Dodd-Frank,” required greater levels of transparency, a trend that has been fueled by social media and the Internet. For more than a decade, companies in all industries have voluntarily published corporate responsibility or sustainability reports. CorporateRegister.com allows you to search 41,238 corporate responsibility reports across 9,153 companies, a number that has been steadily increasing.

Maybe there is a cause and effect here. The corporate scandals of the past have shown by painful example, just how quickly a company’s reputation, and brand value, can be damaged. Company employees, customers and shareholders know more, and increasingly care more, about corporate behavior. So in today’s world, smart business leaders know that investing in ethical behavior is money well spent.

More important, I believe, is the need of every company to attract and engage talent. A new younger generation of leaders is rising in corporate America, and many of them bring social and environmental values to the job and will only work for responsible companies.

My new book, Changing Business from the Inside Out, delivers practical advice to this new group of committed business people. They recognize the power of business to drive positive change in the world. Changing Business From the Inside Out is “field guide” of practical tips, hard-won wisdom and leading edge concepts for people interested in a career in corporate responsibility. Here are the top five tips from the book: [click to continue…]

Thanksgiving Coffee is a family-owned, artisan roaster that sells most of its coffee to grocers, specialty stores and restaurants near its home base in Mendocino County, CA, where the other popular crop is often smoked. Thanksgiving bought about 500,000 pounds of coffee last year.

Yet the big coffee company and the little one share a couple of important goals.

First, they want to win the trust of their customers and, of course, their own employees. One way to do that is by showing them that their coffee is ethically-sourced. Starbucks talks about responsibly grown coffee, citing its Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) Practices, a set of social, economic, environmental and quality guidelines. Thanksgiving’s slogan is ““Not Just a Cup, but a Just Cup.” Reputation matters, whether you are big or small.

But, even if reputation didn’t matter (and to most customers, it probably doesn’t), Starbucks and Thanksgiving need to devote their attention to the social and environmental practices of their growers, upon whom they depend for a reliable supply of high-quality coffee. If their coffee farmers run into trouble–because of low coffee prices, poor environmental practices or climate change–Starbucks and Thanksgiving will struggle, too.

The other day, I wrote about the Fair Trade movement and its efforts to improve the lives of coffee growers. (See my blogpost, A Schism over Fair Trade.) About 9 percent of the coffee sold by Starbucks in the US is certified as Fair Trade; about 75% of Thanksgiving’s coffee is Fair Trade certified. Today, I’ll dig a bit deeper into the ways Starbucks and Thanksgiving work with growers. [click to continue…]

I’m skeptical about efforts to rank and rate green or sustainable companies, and I have been for a time. [See 100 Best Corporate Citizens? What a CROck!] It’s terribly difficult to compare big and small companies, retailers with manufacturers, software firms with oil companies, etc. We once tried at FORTUNE, and gave up because we decided it couldn’t be done right.

Having said that, I’m impressed with the rigor and methodology used by a Canadian magazine called Corporate Knights to produce its 8th annual list of Global 100 Most Sustainable Companies, which it calls “the most extensive data-driven corporate sustainability assessment in existence.” The ratings are transparent and they encompass social as well as environmental metrics, among them energy, carbon, waste and water productivity, diversity and employee turnover, safety and, interestingly, the ratio between CEO and average worker pay–a revealing metric that most such rankings do not include. Disclousre: While I played no part in putting the list together, I did write a profile of Novo Nordisk, the top-ranked company, for Corporate Knights.

A couple of things to note about the list. First, US companies perform poorly. There’s not one US-based company in the top 10. Intel (No. 18)Life Technologies (No. 15) is the highest ranked US-based firm, followed by Intel (18), Agilent (59), Johnson Controls (64), Procter & Gamble (66) and IBM (69). Lest you suspect a Canadian bias, our neighbors to the north did no better. The top-ranked Canadian firm was Suncor (48), which calls itself an “oil sands pioneer. Go figure.

Of the 22 countries with companies that made the list, the UK led the way with 16 Global 100 companies, followed by Japan with 11 and France and the US with eight. Northern European countries (Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden) punched above their weight, which isn’t surprising.